Evening Lights by Albert Henry Robinson

Provenance:
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal
Kastel Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Paul Duval, Canadian Impressionism, Toronto, 1990, page 130

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Albert Robinson left Canada to pursue academic training in Paris in 1903, where he studied at the Académie Julian under William Bouguereau and at the École des beaux-arts before embarking on painting trips throughout Normandy in the summers of 1904 and 1905. Holding fast to the tenets of his formal European training, Albert Henry Robinson would nonetheless remain faithful to his Canadian roots, returning to paint the rural landscapes of Ontario and Quebec for the remainder of his career alongside Clarence Gagnon, Edwin Holgate, and A.Y. Jackson.

His vision of the harbours and villages of his home is an idyllic one—a portrait in soft focus. In “Evening Lights”, Robinson captures the pale lavender light of dusk as the sun sets on a rural town blanketed in snow. Robinson’s scenes of the Quebec countryside and its inhabitants are characterized by their simplified forms and gentle hues, mixed with generous amounts of white paint and applied with the artist’s characteristic crisp, rectilinear brushstrokes. Rather than capturing the country through depictions of barren terrain, Robinson narrows his focus on the dwellings of emerging towns and cities in the early twentieth century, lending life and narrative to the prevailing landscape painting tradition in Canada.